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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5174226" data-attributes="member: 82106">I concur. Tying this back to both KD's view of encounter design consequences and the OP's original question, my experience is more like Benimoto's.I find that monster turns go quite quickly. The most common situation is a monster takes between 10 and 30 seconds. My players aren't astoundingly tactical, I don't feel compelled to think deeply about what the monsters are going to do next because basic tactics are fully sufficient to give them a challenge. I don't put lots of complex monsters in every encounter either. In fact in the majority of encounters there may at most be one monster that is doing anything much beyond using a simple attack power each round and maybe moving. Often the monster can unleash some special power once, most often at the start of combat.The result is adding 2 monsters or even 4 monsters to a combat is not going to have an appreciable effect. (4 monsters * 30 seconds * 6 rounds = 12 minutes worst case). Another mitigating factor to using more weaker monsters is that unless the party is monumentally tactically incompetent or seriously poor at generating damage these weaker monsters will go down pretty quickly. Going to KD's example the 27 HP level 1 monsters die 2x quicker than the 45 HP level 3 monsters. This means in your typical 6 round encounter these 7 starting monsters will be dying about 1 per round vs the 4 monsters that die roughly 1 every 2 rounds. This means you'll have only 4 monsters left on round 3 where with the higher level monsters you'll have 2-3 monsters left. Its true that the 7 monsters will have better action economy on their side as well and will probably dish out a bit more damage per round overall AT THE START, but the situation will shift later in the fight. I'd say the level 1 monsters will be a slightly greater challenge, depending on the makeup of the party, but KD also sounds like he's got a problem challenging his party when he talks about it being almost impossible to knock a character down by 5th level. I don't have that problem at all, combats are tense. The chance of characters going down is very real. In terms of their being specific types of 'bad monsters' to use, like Wraiths, this is a matter of encounter design. Using lots of any specific type of monster that has some sort of special ability is usually problematic. 7 Halfling Slingers vs a level 1 party for instance is a very deadly encounter. Using 5 Wraiths against a level 5 party will be a very deadly encounter as well (usually). Yes, these Wraiths will probably be a grindy encounter, but its also just a rotten encounter design and doesn't even conform to any of the advice in DMG1. Wraiths are lurkers and there is no encounter template that suggests using 5 lurkers. In fact I don't recall one OTTOMH that recommends more than ONE lurker. Nevertheless I used 3 Wraiths, a Mad Wraith, and an Osteopede (an elite skirmisher), and 3 drowned ones (level 4 IIRC and lacking the nasty status effect of normal ghouls) vs a level 8 party a few months ago and it was perfectly fine. Notice that the monsters were all a bit under level. This was a challenging encounter, but not a grindy one in our experience. The Wraiths were quite simple to run. The 3 drowned ones were neutralized by the wizard on round one using good tactics and Thunderwave. Every couple rounds they had to be T-waved back into the water, making a nice set of tactical choices for the wizard. The Osteopede was a bit more complex to run but it was hardly a huge time suck. The fighter tied up the wraiths pretty effectively (and got beaten to a pulp in the process) while the cleric and the rogue focus fired on each one and took them out systematically. The starlock was actually quite free to do whatever he wanted and spent half the encounter fooling around with some terrain features (which eventually resulted in crippling most of the monsters in round 6).So, in that encounter at least a combination of interactive terrain, a tactical puzzle that the PCs could solve to their advantage, and reasonably solid tactics combined with using slightly under level monsters in ample supply made a good encounter mix. Even going to a bit of an extreme with the Wraiths was perfectly acceptable in this particular situation. It CAN be a problematic monster, but it doesn't have to be.Way back in the early days of my running 4e I also used a couple of Wraiths against a similar level 3 party and that wasn't actually grindy either. The cleric locked down one of those Wraiths on turn 1 and it was dead on round 2 as the whole party dogpiled it. There were some skeletons IIRC in that one as well that didn't give them much trouble either. The second Wraith raised cain with the squishies for a while but again I don't recall it being particularly grindy. In fact it was anti-climactic than anything else since the monsters were pretty much on the ropes from the start, though the party did burn about 3 of their 5 daily powers.</blockquote>

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